OP is absolutely mistaken that it’s somehow ableist to stick to a meeting deadline or similar “punishment” for lateness, and t3rmit3 has said why much more eloquently than I could. However, you’ve said something that I can’t let pass without a rebuttal.

perpetual lateness means someone values their time more than they do the commitment and the time of others. period.
[…]
perpetual lateness, though, is a statement, that individual could not give a shit what others needs and responsibilities are

This is making a moral judgment on what you believe is in someone’s mind, and your judgment is based on a false premise. There exists an extremely common mental disorder (so common that some might consider it a form of neurodivergence) that when left untreated makes it much harder to do the things you want and are obligated to do. It’s harder to start doing things, it’s harder to stop, it’s harder to focus yet too easy to focus, it’s harder to remember important things, and it’s harder to motivate yourself to do anything you aren’t doing at any given moment, and anything you have to put effort into motivating yourself to do leaves you with less mental energy to do anything else in that category.

The one thing that can usually overcome all of these mental blocks is panic - when you’re actually out of time and Consequences are approaching if you don’t do something RIGHT NOW then you can finally do what you need to do and get something done - later than you wanted, worse than you wanted, more mentally drained, and with plenty of reasons to beat yourself up over it, not that it helps if you do. This is the reason behind why most people show up perpetually late. They might not let the emotional turmoil show, but if they’re consistently a few minutes late for everything, I can just about promise it’s not because they don’t care.

People who have this disorder and receive prescription medication for it often describe the first dose as like receiving superpowers. The idea that they can decide they want to do something, and then just go do it? Without thinking about it? No buildup? No psyching yourself into it? No roundabout coping strategies? No reorganizing the entire structure of your life to make it happen? No bargaining with the goddamn monkey in your brain that almost never lets you do the rational thing? Wait, normal people don’t have the monkey? They live like this every day, without any expensive pills? Impossible. It couldn’t be that simple. Do they have any idea how lucky they are?

Your misplaced sense of moral superiority is unfortunately quite common, but it’s not going to help these people, it’s going to hurt them. If it’s affecting their life, and it often is, they need treatment and training in how their brain works, not to be told they’re a piece of shit who doesn’t care about others and are choosing to inconvenience everyone else in their life including themselves. That’s only going to put them in a worse place.

PCIe gen 5 is for the PCIe slots and NVMe storage slots, but they’re backwards compatible; you can put a gen 3 component in a gen 5 slot and it will work at gen 3 speeds. Similarly, if you put a gen 5 component in a gen 4 slot, it will be limited to gen 4 speeds. Right now there’s very little appreciable difference between gen 4 and gen 5 unless you’re spending a lot of money on the component (GPU/storage). Another thing to note is that Gen 5 requires that both the CPU and motherboard support it; a CPU with gen 4 support in a gen 5 motherboard will limit all the slots to gen 4 speeds.

RAM is a totally different standard that must be matched exactly for what the motherboard has; if it’s a DDR5 motherboard then you have to use DDR5 RAM or it won’t even fit in the slots. You can get a PCIe gen 5 motherboard and just use gen 4 SSDs or GPUs, that’s perfectly fine and leaves you room to upgrade later.

Seems mostly fine to me, I game all the time on Linux (Bazzite gang 🤘) with a 3900X + 7900GRE, haven’t had any significant issues aside from needing to make sure clock speeds were configured correctly on the GPU. Two ram sticks is the way to go with these systems as sometimes they don’t support 4 sticks at full speed.

You’re right that GPU passthrough is definitely more for tinkering or advanced users with very specific needs (usually professionals who need Windows/Nvidia and choose to run it in a VM rather than dual-boot), with a budget to match. For a gamer couple, having fully separate systems is going to be much less hassle and more resilient against failure.

The one thing I would recommend changing is the power supply, it’s unironically the most important component in the computer because if it fails it can kill everything else, and the System Power 10 is known enough for being low-quality that discussions of that come up in web searches. Poor quality power supplies can damage your hardware and otherwise cause weird, intermittent issues even if everything seems to work fine most of the time, and will fail and shut off the computer when a good power supply would have just kept on chugging. Seasonic and Corsair are considered the best brands and have 10 year warranties - they’re more expensive, but they’re worth it. You want 80+ Gold or better these days, this is a buy once, cry once component.

If you don’t have a UPS, I would also recommend getting one at some point, either one big shared unit (if they’ll be close together) or two individual units. Having backup power will allow you to shut down the computers gracefully during a power outage, and prevents the worst-case scenario where the power goes out while the computer is installing updates and it turns into a brick.

At least their username is accurate!

He did at the beginning, but he helped them get what they wanted in the end, and I think that counts for something.

“We’re thankful that the Biden administration played the long game on sick days and stuck with us for months after Congress imposed our updated national agreement,” Russo said. “Without making a big show of it, Joe Biden and members of his administration in the Transportation and Labor departments have been working continuously to get guaranteed paid sick days for all railroad workers.

“We know that many of our members weren’t happy with our original agreement,” Russo said, “but through it all, we had faith that our friends in the White House and Congress would keep up the pressure on our railroad employers to get us the sick day benefits we deserve. Until we negotiated these new individual agreements with these carriers, an IBEW member who called out sick was not compensated.”

Counterpoint: Scumbag companies ninja-editing their timestamped warranty page such that the only way you know they edited it after you bought the product is because it was archived previously.

Archives are ideal for identifying sneaky behavior like that. You never know when an admin might have the ability to delete or edit something without anyone noticing.

Beats me on what do they spend those taxes

It’s spent on what is by far the most powerful, expensive, and expansive military in the world, with funding about equivalent to the next ten militaries combined. All of Europe barely has any military spending by comparison; NATO is almost entirely propped up by the US military industrial complex. If US foreign policy wasn’t so doggedly imperialist, we might have room for some healthcare.

That’s not even getting into how medical corporations in the US are more or less financially unrestrained and allowed to make as much money as they want, paired with an insurance industry with the same conditions, and both industries becoming more and more consolidated, with all the big players participating in the stock market. The result is a race to the top in which everything is made far more expensive than it needs to be in order to please shareholders. In this environment, spending government money on US healthcare is substantially less efficient than the same spending would be in a European country.

Correction of these markets, as with housing, is likely to be financially devastating to the economic elite, but also critical to the prosperity of real people in this country.

You don’t need to add the exe of whatever mod tool to Steam, use Steam Tinker Launch. It lets you add an exe to run instead of the game, concurrent with the game, or injected after the game is up, and it will run in the same prefix that Proton uses for that game. It also has tools for installing and using several mod managers, and generally a ton of good features for tinkering with the game.

The main issue I haven’t solved is getting something like the Nexus mods “open in manager” to work. My guess is I might have to install, run, and configure a web browser inside the prefix, but that sounds really annoying so I haven’t tried it.

Technically, any model trained on LAION-5B before December 2023 was trained on CSAM.

But yeah, I expect any porn model trained on a sufficient diversity of adult actors could be used to make convincing CP even without having it in the training data. AI image generation is basically the digital equivalent of a chainsaw - a tool for a particular messy job that can really hurt people if used incorrectly. You wouldn’t let a typical kid run around unattended with one, that’s for sure.

It says in the list that there’s not enough space to produce a reasonable quantity. So you’re correct, it’s not there.

Doesn’t have HDR, and doesn’t have eye tracking? Those are two of its biggest selling points! What were they thinking?

Why are you all so upset? These stock buybacks don’t pay for themselves, you know!

God I hate the stock market.

I was in your shoes for ages, but HeliBoard has predictions and other languages out of the box. Voice transcription works if you have FUTO Voice Input. Gesture typing uses a swypelibs binary extracted from Gapps; you just have to download it manually since the app never requests network access (instructions are on the Github page). I started using it today and some of its features actually seem to work better for me than Gboard, like the swipe gestures on delete or space, and it has at least a few more features I’m pretty sure Gboard doesn’t. Give it a look at least.

Net Neutrality is about not policing content online. That’s kind of its whole thing:

These net neutrality policies ensured you can go where you want and do what you want online without your broadband provider making choices for you. They made clear your broadband provider should not have the right to block websites, slow services, or censor online content. These policies were court tested and approved. They were wildly popular. In fact, studies show that 80 percent of the public support the FCC’s net neutrality policies and opposed their repeal.

The closest we get to online censorship is obscenity laws, which one might think applies to porn, but obscenity is actually defined much more narrowly than just “content designed to arouse”. Obscenity is basically stuff that even Hugh Hefner would find offensive, stuff the average adult would find deeply repulsive and abhorrent (not just a little bit, the exact language is “patently offensive”). Adult content in general (obscenity & indecency) is banned from broadcast media during daytime hours to keep kids from seeing it; subscription-based services are exempt from such rules, which presumably means that the adults who pay for the subscription are supposed to be the ones preventing kids from using it to view adult material, if such is possible. I expect this is why anything which does manage to qualify as obscene is typically very hard to get to unless you really want to see it, so nobody who might report it ever actually finds it.

It’s worth mentioning that obscenity laws apply whether Net Neutrality is a thing or not, so having it will be a net reduction in the avenues through which content may be censored or policed. Now if only they’d ban ISPs from selling your data to brokers…

VPN subscriptions about to explode.

Naturally, they’ll try to ban VPNs next.

It’s very disappointing to see someone come to a post about a game bundle to support Palestine only to uncritically surface claims from a site with a blatant pro-Israel, pro-Zionism bias. Zionism and Judaism are not the same thing. Zionism is a sect of Judaism characterized by an extreme ethnic nationalist doctrine (with expected bedfellows). NGO Monitor repeats the utter nonsense that being Anti-Zionist or Anti-Israel is somehow anti-Semitic. It’s not - the earliest anti-Zionists were Jews. The idea that being against or critical of Zionism is the same as being racist against Jews is an absurd fiction pushed by Zionist foreign policy in order to insulate Israel from all forms of criticism; sadly, it seems to be working. In any case, I’m not inclined to believe one word printed by NGO Monitor where Israel or Palestine are involved.

Blog commenter Frank Wilhoit made a now somewhat famous assertion that the human default for nearly all of history has been conservatism, which he defined as follows:

There must be in-groups whom the law protects but does not bind, alongside out-groups whom the law binds but does not protect.

He then defined anti-conservatism as opposition to this way of thinking, so that would be to ensure the neutrality of the law and the equality of all peoples, races, and nationalities, which certainly sounds left-wing in our current culture. It would demand that a legal system which protects the powerful (in-groups) while punishing the marginalized (out-groups), or systematically burdens some groups more than others, be corrected or abolished.

Seconding Dragon’s Dogma: Dark Arisen. I have it on GOG, it’s absolutely fantastic (apparently the pawn rental system is broken on that version, but I never used it anyway). Climbing up a drake to stab it in the face has never been so satisfying! and magic archer is OP

It’s also old enough that OP’s hardware shouldn’t have any trouble running it at decent settings.

Edit: I just realized the GOG version is currently on sale for under $5, what are you waiting for?

Yeah, we only have to look at the FTC’s lawsuit against Amazon to see what they consider an antitrust problem:

[…] Amazon violates the law not because it is big, but because it engages in a course of exclusionary conduct that prevents current competitors from growing and new competitors from emerging. By stifling competition on price, product selection, quality, and by preventing its current or future rivals from attracting a critical mass of shoppers and sellers, Amazon ensures that no current or future rival can threaten its dominance.

That isn’t what we see from Valve - in fact it’s the opposite, as Valve’s strategy with Steam is simply to provide the best service and be the gold standard. The competition is almost always compared unfavorably to Steam, because gamers know how it feels to use a mature platform that isn’t trying to abuse them.

Valve has even taken some steps that wind up increasing competition in adjacent markets, such as operating systems (Proton has contributed significantly to Linux popularity) and even handheld game devices (Steam Deck set off an arms race when electronics manufacturers realized Nintendo is asleep at the wheel). Steam is as pro-consumer as it gets, with the exception of GOG and possibly itch.

They’re more than fine with it, the Bits N’ Bricks podcast (part of LEGO Gaming) actually had Baraklava (the Manic Miners dev) on for an episode about the history of Rock Raiders which included a section on remakes, including Manic Miners, so they outright drew attention to it. Very cool people over there at the LEGO Group.